The Pity Of War Explaining World War I (Paperback)

by Niall Ferguson (Author) "It is often asserted that the First World War was caused by culture: to be precise, the culture of militarism, which is said to have..." (more)
Key Phrases: net body count, billion goldmarks, combatant states, Lloyd George, Central Powers, First World War (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
If someone less distinguished than Jesus College, Oxford, fellow Niall Ferguson had written The Pity of War, you could be forgiven for thinking the book was out for a few cheap headlines by contradicting almost every accepted orthodoxy about the First World War. Ferguson argues that Britain was as much to blame for the start of the war as Germany, and that, had Britain sacrificed Belgium to Germany, the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution would never have happened. Germany, he continues, would have created a united European state, and Britain could have remained a superpower. He also contends that there was little enthusiasm for the war in Britain in 1914; on the other hand, he claims the war was prolonged not by clever manipulation of the media, but by British soldiers' taking pleasure in combat. If that isn't enough, he further maintains that it wasn't the severity of the conditions imposed on Germany at Versailles in 1919 that led inexorably to World War II, and blames instead the comparative leniency and the failure to collect reparations in full.

The Pity of War, with no pretensions to offering a grand narrative of the war, goes over its chosen questions like a polemical tract. As such it is immensely readable, well researched, and controversial. You may not end up agreeing with all of Ferguson's arguments, but that should not deter you from reading it. All of us need our deeply held views challenged from time to time, even if only to remind us why we've got them. --John Crace, Amazon.co.uk --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly
Many readers will disagree with Oxford historian Ferguson's (Paper and Iron) daring revisionist account of the Great War as presented in this superbly illustrated book, but none will be bored by his elegant marshaling of facts to support his case. Ferguson argues that Germany had a justifiable fear of Russian and French militarism and was merely making a preemptive strike in August 1914. He suggests that Britain forced the escalation of what could have been a limited continental war by entering on the side of the Allies and then increased the body count on both sides through sheer ineptitude. An economic historian, Ferguson explains that Germany was efficient at inflicting "maximum slaughter at minimum expense," paying just $5133 to kill each Allied serviceman. The bungling but economically advantaged Allies, on the other hand, paid $16,754 for each German head. For all the book's strengths, however, Ferguson comes up short in his flawed, briefly sketched analyses of the ebb and flow of diplomatic and battlefield events. Grand strategy goes unstudied. Ferguson's war is, in the end, simply an economic problem. Scarcity equals loss, and whoever has the most supplies will prevail. Ultimately, it is hard to feel satisfied with Ferguson's narrow analysis of what is surely a far more complex equation.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 608 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books; New edition edition (March 2, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465057128
• ISBN-13: 978-0465057122
• Product Dimensions: 7.6 x 5.3 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (53 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #21,518 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

27 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "A refreshing variant on an otherwise sterile debate", July 11, 2003

By	Timothy J. Graczewski "tgraczewski" (Burlingame, CA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I was not expecting to like this book. In fact, I very nearly avoided it altogether based on the overwhelmingly negative reviews by some of the leading scholars of strategic studies. In a fascinating exchange on Slate.com in June 1999, Eliot Cohen (my academic advisor, mentor and good friend) and Paul Fussell competed with one another over which one disliked Ferguson's history more, describing his work alternatively as "smarty," "pedantic," "inane," and "irritating."

In the Summer 2001 issue of National Interest, Michael Howard, the doyen of war studies, was decidedly cool to the conclusions in The Pity of War, although not hostile to Ferguson' alternative approach, which he called "a refreshing variant on an otherwise sterile debate." In a separate 2001 interview Michael Howard claimed that the biggest breakthrough in the field of military history in his lifetime had been the "study of 'total history'; history studied in real depth and width."

It seems to me this is precisely what Ferguson's work provides and why it should be recommended. This is a book on war filled with charts and graphs showing the movement of bond prices, not battle maps showing the movement of divisions. If this book were written by a lesser talent, it would have been an embarrassing failure. But Ferguson writes extremely well and (perhaps more importantly given the recondite subject matter) his chapters are neatly laid out and his main points are clearly elucidated. Clearly elucidated -- and outlandish.

The book reads as if it were ghost-written by Alfred von Wegerer, the head of Germany's Center for the Study of the Causes of the War, a quasi-think tank offshoot of the War Guilt Section of the German Foreign Ministry in the 1920s and 30s whose sole mission was to spin the history of World War I in Germany's favor. First, he blames his native Britain for just about everything: diplomatic blundering that led to the start of the war; entry into the war that made it a global conflict; and a contribution to the war that made it stretch on for four long, miserable years. Second, he claims that a German victory would have just led to a benign, EU-like arrangment on the continent. Again, I say: It is the heterodox approach and perspective of this book that makes it well worth reading, not its iconoclastic message.

In closing, if you are looking for one book to read on the First World War, this is not the one to get. If, however, you are familiar with the subject and are looking for a book that will challenge your assumptions and perhaps make you rethink your understanding the seminal conflict of the twentieth century, The Pity of the War may be well-worth your time.

27 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Detailed and controversial economic history of World War I, October 16, 2001

By	R. H OAKLEY "roboakley" (Vienna, VA United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Niall Ferguson got headlines for what would have otherwise been a book for specialists of World War I when he included arguments that Britain should not have entered the war. He acknowledged that this would have certainly meant the fall of France and the acquisition by Germany of territory in the East at the expense of Russia. His argument created a great stir in Britain, which (like France) suffered enormously high casualties in World War I, much worse than in the World War II. Ferguson's book is a thoroughly argued, revisionist approach to the War. He disputes everything from the importance patriotism and war fever played in the early rush of enlistments to whether the Allies were economically more efficient than the Central Powers. Do not buy this book expecting an easy read. Ferguson supports his arguments by large amounts of statistical studies that are daunting even to a reader familiar with the controversies surrounding the war. In the end, one is left with the belief that it could not have been a good thing for Germany to have eliminated France and Russia as world powers, which would have allowed it to build up its Navy in competition with Britain. Of course, there is one benefit that would have come from Germany winning World War I; with the German political structure intact and victorious, it seems certain that Adolph Hitler would have lived his days out in obscurity.
In short, this book is only for someone deeply interested in the economic and social history of World War I.

32 of 37 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting Information & Speculation, but a Few Gaps, October 26, 1999

By	Ellen M. Chinni (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Pity Of War (Hardcover)

Ferguson apparently decided to use his considerable knowledge of World War I research and data to challenge certain "myths" about the war. My most general point is that the reader should be prepared for a very strong bias against his native Britain; Ferguson seems to want to blame Britain for a lot of negative events (i.e. driving Germany into an expensive naval arms race, creating a world war out of a European war, inflation after this huge war, the rise of Hitler...). Germany, in constrast, gets very little space and only mild rebukes for its negative acts (i.e. starting the war by invading neutral Belgium, deliberately killing hundreds of Belgian civilians, killing neutral sailors and civilians through unrestricted submarine warfare, being the first to tell its troops not to take prisioners...) While this switch of focus occasionally will be refreshing for those who have read more conventional books about World War I, reading just this book will give the general reader a very distorted view of the war.

As others have noted, Ferguson's most obvious mistake was in concluding Britain did not have to enter the war because Germany's goal of a 1920s version of the current European Union did not imperil serious British interests. Besides the debate over whether Germany would have been content with that after the achievement of conquering its French enemy and the obvious fact that Britain could never have "known" this at the time, keeping one country from dominating the Continent had been the key focus of British foreign policy for two centuries!

I also expected more discussion of the strategic results of the German decision to go to unrestricted submarine warfare (as I noted above, the moral aspect of this decision is also quite neglected). Since this decision did eventually bring the US into the war, its neglect in a serious World War I book is surprising. In other words, he does not try to determine how much shipping this policy cost Britain. It would have had to deny Britain a large amount of food & arms to offset dragging the large US manpower and productive capacity into the war.

On other matters, I found the book enlightening. His view of the Central Powers as being better combat because they killed more men is known to serious students of the war, but his insight that the Central Powers were able to kill with so much less expenditure was interesting. I was also struck by the fact that even the huge number of dead men in this war were demographically replaceable--which means that the trenches were as useless strategically as they were wretched. This reality leads to another of his key insights--the importance of getting the other side to desert in large numbers, even though that conflicts with the short-term goal of killing men on the other side (both due to your men's emotions and having to use some of your men to escort and guard prisioners).

Last, Ferguson uses his analysis of most soldiers' willingness to keep fighting and some good quotes from a wide variety of sources to support the case that a large number of men did not mind, or even enjoyed, being in the trenches and killing. I believe this reflects the unpleasant reality that humans have a violent side and it will become predominant in many under the right conditions. Since the violent side of humans is one that many of us do not like to think about, I really appreciate that Ferguson discussed it at some length in this book. To get generally philosophical at the end of my review, since the tendency to violence will always exist in us, the most civilization can do is to keep it under control by channeling it (i.e. sports), encouraging people to find other ways to express emotion (i.e. the arts)...